Chemical Engineering Overview - Overview PDF - PowerPoint - Podcast

	B.S. - Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois Ph.D. - Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University
	Core technology leader for food mixing applications
	"A major transition you have to make when you start working is going from being task based to results based. Just accomplishing a series of tasks is not good enough to succeed-you have to achieve results."

"I think if you're in a technology based company, a doctorate may give you, may give you better background to exceed and to advance further. But you need to keep in mind that with any company you go work for, the degree is basically your ticket in and once you start working there, it's the results that you produce. The second day you're on the job nobody cares any more what degree you've got and what school you came from. It's the results you're now going to, you're not going to accomplish on a day-to-day basis."

"You find it's difficult to get everything done that you want to, or you find out that you don't have time to do everything that you would like to do. It is a struggle to maintain a balance between work and your family life or your personal life. In that respect, I think it's very important that you work for a company that recognizes and understands that."

Q: What kind of work do you do?
Niederkorn: You might consider the department I work for, the process expertise center for the company. We're the process experts in a number of what we call our `core processing technologies.' These are fairly common chemical engineering unit operations- liquid mixing, heat transfer, heat exchanges. With each of these technologies, we have a group of people who support the company in that technology. And we have a number of different types of support. We do consulting on actual business projects with our customers. We call them customers, but these business areas are within the company. We do a lot of training and what we call technology transfer, which is taking information that we've learned in one part of the company and reapplying it in other areas. We also do technology development, which is trying to maintain state-of-the-art in a particular technology area.

Q: Who else do you work with on a day-to-day basis?
Niederkorn: We work with a number of engineers from around the world within the company. A lot of the global project work is done through electronic mail or telephone, although some international travel is done. We work with our customer's engineers here in Cincinnati. There are a number of technical centers here in Cincinnati, and we will either go out to their facility or they will come to our facility to work together on executing the projects. And then we'll work within our department. We have other experts within the department who we work with to solve the projects.

Q: What do you like about this position?
Niederkorn: The thing I like about my position-and working for a central organization like we do-is that we support the company across all business areas. You get exposed to a lot of different processes and a lot of different products. So anything Procter & Gamble makes. we can be involved with.

Q: Did your graduate work enable you to be here where you are today?
Niederkorn: The biggest challenge I had moving from school to work was not having enough time to get all of the data you want to make a decision. Because of that, quite often we have to make decisions with little information. A sound understanding of the fundamentals really helps you and guides you when you have to do that. That's one thing a graduate level education does give you. However, a lot of the training is also on the job, so I don't see a bachelor's as necessarily a barrier. It would maybe require more on-the-job training to get you to that point where you can start making decisions with less data.

Q: What prompted you to go to graduate school?
Niederkorn: I originally decided to go to graduate school because I was interested in going into academia. I wanted to become a professor. I enjoyed teaching, the little bit of it I did, tutoring and such, as an undergraduate. However, while I was in graduate school, my desires changed, and I became more interested in actually working in industry. I enjoyed the transition from graduate school to business. To start to actually work on real businesses and have a real business impact was very rewarding.

Q: What are some of the pros of working for a large corporation?
Niederkorn: A lot of people are uncertain about whether they want to work for a large company. One thing I really like about working with a large company is the business impact that you can make. One of the very first projects I had out of school that I completed was worth millions of dollars to the company. So you go from a situation in school to work, where you're immediately given responsibility to work on very high-value projects. I really enjoy that; it motivates me a lot. It's kind of nice to come home at the end of the day and know that you had a $20 million impact on a project you just completed. The other thing that's becoming probably more and more common is globalization. Another aspect I like about my job with P&G is that we also support the company globally outside North America, so we get to work on engineering projects around the world-designs that you are coming up with are being executed and implemented across the globe.

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